“Boy, I ain’t even shot a coon tonight.” He looked to the porch where Pops was lying, squinted in the marginal light, then dropped me to the ground and ran to him. I picked myself up and followed.
“Where’s he shot?”
“In the chest.”
He knelt, opened Pops’ shirt, took his pulse. “When this all happen?”
“Two days ago up at Glaston Lake. Someone also shot Buzzy Fink.” I knelt next to him.
“Shot the Fink boy?” He looked at me in disbelief.
I nodded.
“Where’s he at?”
“Still up there.”
“We gotta get him to Glassville.”
I stood, unsure and immobile.
“Come on, boy!” He shouted and picked up the front end of the stretcher. I took up the back. “I seen his truck by the felled tree.”
We jogged down the Jukes Hollow Road, jostling Pops when our steps got out of sync. We passed Moby and Ahab and climbed over the fallen tree to the truck. He opened the gate on the bed and I slid the travois into it, pushing from the end until the front poles banged the back of the cab. “I’m going to ride with Pops,” I said. He nodded and climbed into the front seat, pulling the ignition key from the mass. He backed up, inching the vehicle around until we were turned, and headed down the road, ash limbs slapping the truck sides like baseball cards on bike spokes.
We carried Pops through the automatic door at Glassville General. “Got a man been lung shot!” Gov Budget shouted. “We got a man needs help!”
The admitting nurse bolted around the counter; a young doctor pushed through the silver metal trauma room doors, stethoscope draped around his neck. Two more nurses appeared with a gurney. We set the travois onto the white specked linoleum and untied him.
“Let’s get em up and into the back,” the doctor said. They squatted, each took a piece of Pops. “On my count—one… two… three.” They lifted him together onto the gurney and slid the bedroll off him. A red-haired nurse placed an oxygen mask over his mouth and forced air into him by squeezing a rubber ball on a mask. Another took his blood pressure. “Eighty-three over forty an fallin,” she said. The doctor examined the wound for a moment, then said, “Okay, let’s go!”
They whisked him through the silver double doors to the back room. I followed.
“You best wait out here,” the blood pressure nurse said to me. “If you’re kin, check in with Nurse Karpo.” She disappeared down the hall.
Nurse Karpo was occupied with paperwork, so I waited for a moment, then opened the doors slightly and slipped into the corridor that held the trauma rooms. The place was quiet except for voices three rooms down. I followed the sounds to an old man slabbed and gray on a table, stripped to the waist, an oxygen mask covering his face. A team of doctors and nurses hovered; a doctor, up to his wrists in a gaping chest incision, shouted orders to everybody. Plastic bags, one with blood, one clear, hung from a stand.
It took me several seconds to realize the man on the table was Pops. A nurse called blood pressure every fifteen seconds, while two others attended the doctors.
“Seventy-five over forty an fallin.”
“We’ve got a bad pneumo in the left lung, maybe a simple in the right. Gotta get a tube in there.”
The second doctor probed deeper into the wound. “Plus, this infection’s gone systemic. Jerry, retract the lung a bit more. And get those bone pieces out of there.”
“Seventy over thirty-eight; still fallin.”
“Damn… let’s get this tube in there.” A nurse passed him a scalpel. He made an incision in Pops’ side and snaked a tube into him. “Come on, where are you?” he said to the tube end as if querying lost keys. “Judith, how much O negative do we have?”
“Just eight more units, Dr. Taber.”
“Well, get it up here and call Johnson City,” he replied curtly.
“Sixty-eight over thirty-five, fallin.”
Suddenly the heart monitor went into hysterics. “He’s fibbin,” a nurse said urgently.
“Shit.”
I couldn’t contain myself any longer. “What’s wrong? You gotta do something,” I yelled. Everyone at the table looked over to me, surprised I was in the room.
“Judith,” Dr. Taber said quickly, and one of the nurses rushed over.
“You can’t be in here, young man. Come with me.”
“What’s wrong? I want to know what’s going on!”
Another nurse whisked over a cart and gave Dr. Taber two defibrillator paddles.
“Two-twenty,” he said, then placed one paddle above Pops’ heart and the other at his side.
“Clear.”
Pops’ body tensed as two hundred and twenty volts surged through him; bits of dirt fell from his boots to the trauma room floor. The nurse pushed me out of the room, took my hand, and closed the door.
“Three hundred… clear.”
I heard the clumpf of another shock.
“They’re doin the best they can on your daddy. Come on over to Nurse Karpo.” To Nurse Karpo she said, “Jobeth, can you see to this young man?”
“He’s my grandfather,” I corrected in a whisper.
“What, honey?”
“He’s my grandfather.”
“Well, they’re doin the best they can with your grandaddy.” She directed me through the doors to the waiting room.
I gave Nurse Karpo all the details of family and the journey.
“Let’s take you back and get you all checked out.”
“Just a second.” I turned to the waiting room, where Gov Budget was hanging back by the entrance, cooning hat in his hands, black hair plastered to his head. I went to him.
Gone was the menace I had seen at Hivey’s. He looked at me with sunken eyes, unburdened by any great curiosity and ringed in gray and dark-blue shadows that logged his hard living like tree rings.
“Thank you for helping me bring him here.”
He nodded. “It’s what neighbors do.”
“I’m sorry I ran at you like that. When I saw your rifle, I thought maybe it was you shooting at us.”
“Don’t worry bout it. I mighta thought the same.” We were silent for a while, trying to find some common conversation.
“Well… thanks, Mr. Budget.”
He nodded and looked straight ahead at the picture on the wall of an English garden with two lines of boxwood leading to a teeming fountain.